"Alphabet"? "Syllabary"? How to categorise sign language writing systems? A Proposal.
"Alphabet"? "Syllabary"? How to Categorise Sign Language Writing Systems? A Proposal
The following article will assume the reader has a familiarity with sign languages, Deaf culture and sign language writing systems. Sources will be given where available. All of the sign language writing systems covered should be available in Zrajm's page (link below).
I am in a weird nerd corner of the internet where we talk about sign language writing systems quite a bit. These are orthographies or notation systems used or proposed to write sign languages.
Another nerd in this space is collating a bunch of these sytems into a big page containing as many as possible - Sign Language Writing (© 2025 Zrajm) (WIP). My discussions and perusal of this list has lead me to some thoughts about how to categorise said systems.
Looking at the above list, at time of writing (09/2025) gives the following chart;
This is a mixture of two separate scales - Linearity and Unicode Compatibility.
Linearity
Linearity is the measure of how well a script can be linearised, that is to say typed one symbol after another. The direction does not matter.
Linearity is not binary - and there are degrees between fully Linear and fully Non Linear.
These categories are not strict, there may also be other categories. But they matter for how a script is presented.
- Linear - Glyphs travel almost exclusively in a set direction. This can be right to left, left to right or boustrophedon (alternating each line).
- Oral Ortho Examples
- English (Latin)
- Greek
- Russian (Cyrillic)
- Japanese (Katakana, Hirugana)
- Sign Ortho Examples
- HamNoSys
- ELiS
- Block - Glyphs are stacked in a uniform way, usually by syllable.
- Oral Ortho Examples
- Korean (Hangul)
- Sign Ortho Examples
- Stokoe Notation
- Modified - A primary glyph is written, with secondary glyphs around it. Languages which use some diacritics but analyse them as separate letters should not be included.
- Oral Ortho Examples
- Arabic (Abjad)
- Hebew (Alefbet ivri)
- Various Abugidas
- Sign Ortho Examples
- Stokoe Notation System
- Non-Linear - Glyphs are not arranged in predictable ways. They may have an overall direction, but their combination is irregular. There may be internal rules, but they are very complicated.
- Oral Ortho Examples
- CJK characters (Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji etc)
- Sign Ortho Examples
- ASLwrite
- (Sutton) Signwriting
Nuance Window: Whether or not CJK characters are "non-linear" could be a matter of a lot of debate. The internal components of said characters, called "radicals" do have rules as to how they are arranged - and externally the system is linear on a page. But there are plenty of radical placements that follow rules far too complex to be easily programmed into a linear printing machine, and thus face the same issues that non-linear writing systems for sign languages face. Thus it is useful to classify them as non-linear for the purpose of this article.
This matters for - reading, writing and typing.
The red line shows an overall direction. Notice how the further down the list we go - the less regular it becomes, until each character is registered individually.
Linear languages are easiest to type - be that on typewriter or on modern devices. Non-linear on the other hand are difficult to type, as each character must be given its own unique entry. In older technology, this meant that each of the thousands of characters of Chinese had to be an individual block for printing.
Block and modified systems have ways of making them typeable, either by adding the modified characters as separate characters or by displaying the diacritical / blocked characters separately in the correct positions relative to one another. Both of these are more software dependant than linear languages - but require less initial set-up than non-linear systems.
However non-linearity provides a lot of freedom and flexibility. This allows for logographic scripts far better than most other options. These two factors will become important later.
Examples of each in sign languages;
Linear: Hamburg Notation System or HamNoSys - is probably the posterchild of linear sign language writing systems. While there are some use of diacritics - it attempts to tease out each individual phoneme, and even sub-phoneme, of a sign into an individual character.
Block/Modified: While examples in this middle ground are lacking - the most famous example is probably Stokoe Notation System. It regularly uses sub-script and super-script characters, as well as sometimes stacked characters. Attempts to linearise it often produce a very different looking script.
Non-Linear: (Sutton) Signwriting and ASLwrite. Signwriting has more internal rules about how glyphs are arranged than ASLwrite, which aims to be a far more "natural" / "go with the flow" system - but both are key examples of systems which produce individual signs as whole units with the characters provided.
I would argue the reason for the relative popularity of Non-Linear systems in sign languages is that the flexibility allows for;
- More condensed written words, as opposed to a simple sign taking up half a page.
- More intuitive words, where a the word as written actually looks like the sign as signed.
Zrajm uses the term "projectional" for these systems;
"Projectional—A writing systems that projects the three dimensions of signing space onto the two dimensional writing surface is said to be projectional. This is true of, for example, ASLwrite, early & late Si5s, SignWriting, Visagrafía, and VisoGrafia. Antonym: linear."
But this makes digitising these systems a nightmare, representing a barrier to their widescale adoption.
Unicode Compatibility
Unicode is "a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized". It contains 159,801 characters.
Put in simple terms, if a system uses pre-existent symbols that are used in standard written communication in spoken languages, punctuation or mathematical symbols - then it is unicode compatible.
This means that most major devices will be able to render it, although not all devices and not all fonts contain all unicode characters.
Thus I propose a four-way distinction;
- Incompatible (e.g. ASLwrite) - incompatible and incapable of becoming.
- Semi-Compatible (e.g Dimskis Notation) - a mix of compatible and incompatible characters
- Compatibilised (e.g. ASLfont) - made compatible via the above methods.
- Compatible (e.g. Stokoe) - pre-extant compatible with no additional steps
Classification
This is primarily what I wanted to write this article about.
In sources, such as Zrajm, the terms "alphabet" and "logography" are used to refer to different systems - but rarely do I see this grounded in an explanation.
- Alphabet - "An alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols called letters to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language."
- Syllabary - "In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) morae which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optional) consonant sound (simple onset) followed by a vowel sound (nucleus)—that is, a CV (consonant+vowel) or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries."
- Abugida / Alphasyllabary - "A segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, similar to a diacritical mark."
- Abjad - "A writing system in which only consonants are represented by letter signs, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader (unless represented otherwise, such as by diacritics)."
- Logogram - Wikipedia - "A written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme."
This begs the question, what is a phoneme of a sign language - what are the equivalents of consonants and vowels?
- American Sign Language phonology - "parameters of a sign (i.e. handshape, location, movement and palm orientation)"
This is the most popular way to analyse sign language phonology, with the 5 parameter model, and is also the way that most phonetic sign language writing systems are structured.
So what is a sign language syllable?
I have encountered various definitions of sign language syllable over time, including ones which relate primarily to how motion is conducted (like beats, one beat being one syllable) - but here I will perhaps use an unusual analysis (although loosely in-line with the first source cited above).
In spoken languages there are, broadly, two types of sound - consonants and vowels. Usually, vowels form the nucleus of a syllable, and consonants can form the starts and ends of them (morae are considered syllables for the purposes of this discussion, syllabic consonants will also not be being considered). Syllabaries usually provide separate, sometimes related, glyphs for these consonant-vowel combinations (e.g. Japanese Katakana "カ" = "ka", "キ" = "ki").
As such, for the purposes of sign language orthographies, I suggest that a sign language syllabogram be those that merge two or more parameters into one glyph. This allows us to recognise the following systems;
- Alphabet - A system that writes each parameter as separate glyphs. This includes any system that writes multiple glyphs per parameter.
- HamNoSys - Separates out each parameter, only uses minimal modification.
- Abugida - A system that writes some parameters as primary/nucleic glyphs, and writes other parameters as modifiers/diacritics on those nucleic glyphs.
- Stokoe - Uses the handshape as a nucleus, and adds subscript / superscript / diacritic markers around it.
- Syllabary - A system that writes single glyphs that simultaneously represent two or more glyphs.
- (Sutton) Signwriting - Combines handshape and orientation, with unique glyphs for each combination.
- Abjad - A system that writes only some parameters, and drops others.
- ASLwrite - Encourages writing only what is necessary to understand the sign well enough. Encourages dropping of extraneous elements and presenting a sign in the simplest manner possible while remaining readable.
- Logography - A system that writes the meaning of signs, and does not attempt to represent the parameters.
- Hand Talk Pictographs - Represents the meaning of signs, likely by using the iconicity of said signs. This system is partially lost and not fully understood, thus take this classification with a grain of salt.
An individual system may be more than one of these at once, although should be primarily categorised based on its most prevalent element.
Notably, this should largely be considered separate from linearity. While they are entwined, it is possible to have unexpected combinations such as a Block Alphabet - as shown by the example of Hangul (Korean).
Featurality
One final axis on which to classify sign language writing systems is as Featural. Once again the main comparison point is Korean Hangul, where the letters broadly resemble shapes of the mouth when pronouncing sounds.
As such I would like to propose 4 classifications;
- Transparent - The glyphs resemble or depict parameters in a way intended to be visually clear.
- ASLwrite
- Signwriting
- Abstracted - The glyphs resemble or depict parameters in an abstracted way that requires each be learnt.
- ELiS
- Visagrafía
- HamNoSys
- Mixed - A mix of featural and arbitrary.
- Dimskis Notation
- Arbitrary - The glyphs do not resemble or depict parameters
- Stokoe Notation
The term "featural" primarily refers to Transparent and Abstracted systems, sometimes mixed systems - although they might be "semi featural". The term "non-featural" would refer to Arbitray, and mixed systems where the featural elements are negligible.
This distinction resembles the tripartite distinction of levels of iconicity (Iconicity: Transparent/Translucent/Arbitrary Signs | Wyzant Ask An Expert). This is categorisation would not apply to Logographies, or logographic elements in an otherwise phonetic wiriting system.
It is interesting to note that featural systems are far more frequent in sign languages than spoken languages.
The majority phonetic writing systems (alphabets, abugidas, abjads and syllabries) for spoken languages evolved from logographies, that then used a rebus principle (i.e. "sounds like Ox") and then those characters became simplified with time. Thus they had no reason nor opportunity to be featural. It is only few systems such as Hangul (Korean), that had a distinct moment of artificial creation, which employ this tactic.
Sign languages writing systems, on the other hand, are all-bar-one (Handtalk Pictographs) artificial inventions. Additionally, as visual languages - they offer an easier way to depict them featurally - simply by drawing the hands, body-parts and lines of motion involved in a sign - as opposed to spoken languages wherein the sound is not visual and the way of making the sound is often a mouth position with no immediately obvious representation.
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